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Astronomy
The NICER experiment, designed to measure neutron stars as never before, just released their first pulsar map, and it’s amazing. After typical supernovae, remnant collapsed cores of matter are left behind. […]
It’s one of the two best meteor showers of the year. Don’t let the full Moon stop you. Every year, as the Earth intercepts the debris streams of comets and asteroids […]
The most famous ‘supernova impostor’ of all could have died back in the 1840s. Here’s what we think kept it alive. In all of astronomy, no stellar event releases more energy […]
If this discovery came in a pre-LIGO era, maybe it would have been a surprise. But in 2019, there’s no mystery at all. Did you hear that astronomers had recently […]
In science, breakthroughs don’t always begin with a ‘eureka’ moment. Sometimes, the true story is absolutely unbelievable. When it comes to our Universe’s origin story, many competing ideas once thrived. […]
The shape of our Universe has long been recognized to be flat. But that isn’t the only possibility. The Universe is expanding, and goes on for farther than even our […]
If an AT-AT walker (or something even larger) wanted to walk across a frozen lake, how thick would the ice have to be? Each winter, one of the most spectacular phenomena […]
The Leonid meteor shower peaks today. Its parent comet taught us where meteor showers come from. Every year, as Earth regularly orbits the Sun, meteor showers repeatedly recur. While August’s Perseids […]
Even before MMA was a combat sport, it was a unique type of astronomy. Today, it’s opening up the Universe as never before. On February 24, 1987, a spectacular signal was […]
For decades, one of the Big Bang’s greatest predictions was shrouded in doubt. The answer was always there on Channel 3. When it comes to the question of how our Universe […]
And if the data is good enough, we can determine that it’s accelerating directly, too, silencing the last remaining doubters. If you want to understand what the Universe is made […]
On May 9, 2016, the prior transit of Mercury occurred, and was photographed many times on a practically continuous basis by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory. Transits of Mercury are rare, […]
A theoretical view of a distant world so far from our Sun that our Solar System appears barely brighter than the remaining stars in the sky. ( Caltech/R. Hurt (IPAC)) Pluto […]
Scientists actively researching this have known the answer for quite some time. It’s time for everyone to catch up. The Big Bang happened 13.8 billion years ago, and is generally regarded […]
Young galaxies are bright and blue; old galaxies are red and dead. So how did this old, red galaxy form so early? The observable Universe contains two trillion distinct galaxies, but […]
Our Universe is 13.8 billion years old, and our Sun formed about 2/3rds of the way through. Here’s what came before it. When it comes to the great cosmic question of […]
It’s one of cosmology’s biggest unsolved mysteries. The strongest argument against it may have just evaporated. The ultimate goal of cosmology contains the greatest ambition of any scientific field: to […]
Traveling interstellar distances in human lifetimes is an amazing dream, but it won’t ever be achieved like this. For centuries, ever since we realized that every star we can see in […]
Simply getting into grad school isn’t enough. The answers to these three questions can make all the difference. It’s time. You’ve done all your research into schools, completed your undergraduate […]
If you think that the Moon is only good for reflecting sunlight, you’ve got another think coming. To human eyes, the Moon is the second brightest visible object, trailing only the […]
We know a lot about what else is out there, but we still don’t know everything. In the quest for life in the Universe, it makes sense to look at […]
There’s so much we don’t know about fast radio bursts and galactic halos. Combined, we get a unique window on the Universe. Deep in space, mysterious signals known as Fast […]
Every object in the Universe is constrained by the laws of physics. Does this mean there are any black holes that shouldn’t exist? When it comes to the objects that […]
It’s a great scientific opportunity of modern times, but we won’t get there with our current observatories. One of the holy grails of modern science is to find a world, […]
You’ve seen a black hole’s event horizon for the first time thanks to them. But they’re only getting started. Earlier this year, 2019, the Event Horizon Telescope collaboration revealed the first […]
In 1789, William Herschel discovered this unique moon around Saturn. 230 years later, its secrets are more promising than ever. Today marks the 230th anniversary of the discovery of Enceladus, one […]
The darkness of the night sky was a mystery for generations of humans. Here’s the reason why. From our perspective here in the Solar System, it makes absolute intuitive sense why […]
We’re one step closer to solving the mystery of how they get so big so fast. A great cosmic mystery for science is explaining how supermassive black holes form. An ultra-distant […]
Many of them are spinning at nearly the speed of light. When you do the math, there’s no other way it could have been. Take a look out there at the […]
What makes Uranus and Neptune-like worlds so fascinating? If you only knew. What do we really know, and what mysteries are left to solve, about the outer worlds of our Solar […]